Also includes a 204 page A4 book of material related to the artists on the cassettes, including many pictures, and an extensive discography of Fluxus recordings, plus scores by Joe Jones, Dick Higgins, Robert Filliou, Henning Christiansen, Wolf Vostell, Ken Friedman, and Eric Andersen.

Tracklisting:

Side A recorded at KRAB Radio, Seattle, Washington, September 1977. Side B recorded at the Roma Zoo, October 1985 in collaboration with Lorenzo Mammi, Roma. Side C recorded in mono at New Wilderness Studio, New York by Ondine Fiore, December 1977. Side D recorded at Radio Vienna, Austria, 1990. Side E recorded in the artist's former apartment in New York City. Side F recorded in Linz (Austria) for "Ars Electronica Festival" 1988. Sides G & H recorded at Gallerie Lavignes, Bastille, Paris, France, 1990. Track I1 recorded at Bonn Kunstverein Fluxus performance festival 1989. Track I3 recorded at Galerie Kolon in 1989. Side K recorded at Big Orbit Gallery, Buffalo on November 9, 1991. Track L3 recorded on 27-12-1991 Stuttgart. Track M1 recorded in New York 1991. Track M3 is an excerpt from a 5 hour performance recorded in the streets of Quebec City during the "Day of the music" by United Nations on October 1, 1988. Track M5 recorded at Judson Church, New York 1977. Track M6 recorded during a phone conversation between Ben & Jan van Toorn, December 15, 1994. Track N6 recorded October 11th 1992 in 's-Hertogenbosch. Track N7 recorded live on September 9, 1994 during the opening of Ay-O's 'Hanging Pieces' exhibition at Kasseler Kunstverein, Museum Fridericianum Kassel.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Artist Chris Marker died yesterday at his home in Paris, on the day of his 91st birthday. Marker produced over 50 films, the best known being La Jetee, a black&white post-apocalyptic sci-fi film on time travel, told almost entirely in stills. The premise, of a man haunted by the memory of his own death, inspired Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys. The film borrowed enough from Marker's 28-minute work that he was given a writing credit.

Marker rarely granted interviews and when asked for publicity photographs to accompany articles, the artist often submitted an image of a cat.

"Workfortheeyetodo was a book-space organised by Simon Cutts, Maggie Smith and Erica Van Horn. It functioned as a bookshop for its selected material, as the prime and most vital means of distribution, and as a reference place for the activity surrounding the book as a medium. At the time this seemed to emanate from the visual arts, but it is closely related to other fields of art, music and literature. As such it provides a resource for use. Integral to this expanding practice, workfortheeyetodo also arranged displays and exhibitions together with readings, to examine and present other collections of material and antecedents, to publicise new books in the field, and to itemise new additions and donations for reference.

Workfortheeyetodo was begun by Coracle in 1992 and sustains itself on a near shoe-string budget for economy of purpose. From previous experience it would seem that bookshops of this nature can at best barely hope to cover costs, and certainly could not present display material needing research and careful accumulation. Its commercial functioning is perhaps only a model of distribution rather than a finite accomplishment.

The mythology of artist-run spaces is now part of the general sentimentality of our time for another. As alternative has become establishment, as underground has become fringe, this has often been the result of a lack of historical understanding in favour of mere media citation. With the arrival of the curator-property speculator we have entered a new phase, and when there is little consideration of immediate history, art activity is relegated to the blandness of football. A commodification of art as business and succes, no amount of faddish conceptualism can justify. On the one hand we have never been so surrounded by career anarchists, predicated on the radical-chic of Modernism, the poet-maudit. On the other, what can it mean to be an artist-run space when the Lisson Gallery is also one?" - Simon Cutts

An offshoot of this project was the Little Critic Pamphlet (whose name Art Metropole referenced in their Little Cockroach Press series. I remember Steven Leiber finding it impossible not to refer to TLCP as anything other than "little cricket press"), which produced around 20 pamphlets, many of them can be purchased at Boekie Woekie, here, for 7.50 Euros.

The tenth Little Critic Pamphlet opens with a quote Stéphane Mallarmé from his 1895 essay Crise de Vers:

"The pure work implies the elocutory disappearance of the poet, who abandons the initiative to words mobilized by the shock of their inequality; they light one another up with mutual reflections like a virtual trail of fire upon precious stones, replacing the breathing perceptible in the old lyrical blast of the enthusiastic personal direction of the phrase."

followed by Cutts' text (a line per page):

The unit of the work cannot be the sentence

or the phrase

or the line

the linear syntax structure causes

the line

the phrase

the sentence

to be systematic, sequential

the unit of the work is the

word

and lastly, a section called Notes, in which Cutts expands on the above:

"The work is its own continuous accumulative impression, varying and differing not only for each reader, but each time it is read. For this continuous structure to be effective, it must to be the antithesis of a sequential reading…to have read the work in sequence is only one of several possibilities, as the supposed sequence exists in a condition of simultaneity."

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Released by the German label Edition S Press (who also put out albums and cassettes by a wide variety of visual artists, sound artists, writers, etc., including Terry Fox, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Henri Chopin, John Giorno, Anne Waldman, Philip Corner, Jackson Maclow) the Brion Gysin Show "Where Is That Word?" is a 32:15 minute is a series of permutated poems originally recorded for broadcast by the BBC.

An excerpt called Pistol Poem can be heard on Artforum's website, here.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

The third and final recording by what was essentially a super-group of the downtown new music scene. Peter Gordon and avant-percussionist David Van Tiegham are the main players on this disk, with previous incarnations of the band including Laurie Anderson, Kathy Acker, Arthur Russell, Rhys Chatham and Blue Gene Tyranny.

Though credited to "Static Kling" the album cover is clearly designed by Lawrence Weiner, who is thanked in the liner notes.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Hammon's first published bookwork is a kind of appropriation closed circuit, taking Duchamp's assisted readymade's to the their logical conclusion. Hammon's rebound the soft-cover edition of Arturo Schwarz’s 1969 book The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp as a leather-bound, gilded edge bible with slip-case.

The work is often read as a critique, mocking the exaltation of Duchamp in the contemporary art world, and could also function as an update of Rauschenberg's patricidal Erased de Kooning (note the use of the old testament). But Hammon's work has frequently nodded to Duchamp in the past (such as Fountain and Nude Descending a Staircase in the below 1990 Untitled photograph, and 1982's Bag Lady In Flight) and the piece could certainly also function as a genuine homage.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.